Content Marketing Archives

Email Open Rates: Misleading Metrics and Best Practices

It’s Still Not Working While email open rates aren't a viable way to measure marketing effectiveness, we recommend some proven ways to get more from your email marketing. There’s no time like the present for us marketing professionals to stop using email open rates to measure marketing campaign effectiveness. It’s 2019, and they’re still not helping us get where we want to go as marketers, and, at best, they’re an untrustworthy and misleading metric. Aside from being difficult to read and unreliable, they direct our attention away from metrics that really matter, like clicks, conversion, and adoption. (If you’re [...]

Email Open Rates: Misleading Metrics and Best Practices2023-03-06T10:09:48-05:00

Writing Winning Content: Meet Summer Fun with Arduino Challenge Winner Phil Hopley

When Phil Hopley retired from a 40-year career as an engineer, he added adventure travel to his life. Oh, yeah, and he started a home robotics project. In the process, he’s won a developer challenge (or two). Welcome to Phil Hopley, Version R.0. The Challenge(s) In the “Summer Fun with Arduino Challenge” where Phil took first prize, there were four challenges for participants to choose from, ranging from the fun and interactive to the deep and educational. They included building an Arduino LED binary counter creating Morse code, showcasing a working Arduino project that they were already developing, and [...]

Writing Winning Content: Meet Summer Fun with Arduino Challenge Winner Phil Hopley2023-03-06T10:09:46-05:00

Will Your Metrics Send Your Content Campaign Careening Off a Cliff or Climbing to New Heights?

So Much Vanity, So Little Time The savvy tech content marketer constructs content marketing campaigns with the metrics in mind. These metrics not only measure success, but they help the marketer fine-tune their campaign as they roll it out. Meaningful metrics aren’t just end points, they are markers of the success of the campaign along the way. They should bring valuable data that helps inform decisions even as content is rolling out. Yet, despite your savviness, do ever feel... …cheated by your metrics? If you do, you might be using vanity metrics that aren’t connected to a business goal. [...]

Will Your Metrics Send Your Content Campaign Careening Off a Cliff or Climbing to New Heights?2023-03-06T10:09:45-05:00

Content Marketing Tactics Include Developer Challenges

Satisfy Learning Junkies People love showing off, especially to their peers. Developers are no different. Developers are also addicted to the bright, shiny object. The new thing. And that means they are kind of learning junkies. Modern IT professionals are no different. Evans Data Corporation’s latest Developer Marketing Survey bears that out, with >80% of developers claiming they are likely to share tutorial content with their peers. Keep It Fresh Sharing is great. But what about inspiring developers to take one more step and use the bright shiny object? What about getting developers to write about their use cases? [...]

Content Marketing Tactics Include Developer Challenges2023-03-06T10:09:44-05:00

How Long Should You Wait? Content Marketing Campaign Result Timelines

The sad, sad reality of technical content marketing is true for pretty much all content marketing campaigns: they need time to build steam. Expect to see results in 6 months with organic traffic, brand awareness, and share of voice/share of conversation continuing for up to 2 years. Our experience gleaned from our clients bears that out, as well as the experience of several others. However, there is some dependence on the type of campaign, the desired result for your company, the metrics you are focusing on, and some factors contributing to success that you can influence. When Will I [...]

How Long Should You Wait? Content Marketing Campaign Result Timelines2023-03-06T10:09:43-05:00

Is a Blog Frequency of Twice a Week Enough?

Conventional Wisdom (?) One way to reach the modern developer is by offering them technical content regularly on your company’s blog. Based on anecdotal experience, we recommend a blog frequency of at least twice a week. However, thanks to HubSpot, there is new data about blogging for B2B marketing that suggests the frequency should be higher, begging the question, “Is a blog frequency of twice a week enough?” More Is More According to HubSpot’s blog post "How Often Should Companies Blog?" (with benchmark data updated in 2019): “B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more [...]

Is a Blog Frequency of Twice a Week Enough?2023-03-06T10:09:23-05:00

How Technical Content Influences Brand Awareness And The Metrics That Matter

Talk Technical to Me Brand awareness is typically measured using a variety of metrics. Surveys tend to be useful, with logo recognition and brand recognition helping build out that data. Other metrics that can flesh out the picture of brand awareness include share of voice and net promoter score. For companies marketing to developers, technical content influences brand awareness, perception, and trust. Metrics That Matter Share of voice is historically defined in terms of advertising and PR, but it is now applied to marketing. From a PR standpoint, it is a measure defined as the number of conversations being [...]

How Technical Content Influences Brand Awareness And The Metrics That Matter2023-03-06T10:09:22-05:00

How to Calculate your Content Marketing ROI

What Is It? Content marketing return on investment, or ROI, is a ratio of the return of your content marketing campaign in whatever units are important to you (usually currency), divided by the cost in the same units (again, usually currency). While the units must be uniform in order to create a dimensionless number to draw comparisons, inputs can include other units of measure — like staff hours — that are converted to a currency unit. It’s pretty simple, so why does it feel so hard? Probably because many times even a successful content marketing campaign is hard to [...]

How to Calculate your Content Marketing ROI2023-03-06T10:09:21-05:00

Developer Sentiment

Sentiment Defined Sentiment as it regards to marketing and PR usually refers to social sentiment, which is the emotion associated with your brand when it is mentioned on social media. It can also be a measure of the tone of articles mentioning your brand or competitors. Either way, it is a measure of your brand creating positive or negative associations. What Is Developer Sentiment? Developer sentiment refers specifically to the emotion and tone that developers use when mentioning your brand. If your business depends on developer adoption or influence, developer sentiment is important to understand and to influence. But [...]

Developer Sentiment2023-03-06T10:09:20-05:00

Metric Mythology: Click thru, conversions, and page views

What Is Metric Mythology? No, this isn’t about how metrics are useless, wrong, or meaningless. Metric mythology is a set of stories about a situation that can be exaggerated or fictitious. They can be misleading. It’s easy to forget what metrics measure and what they don’t. Here’s a quick guide to some metric mythology to keep you from misinterpreting your metrics and drawing false conclusions about your content marketing campaign. Low Click Thru Rate, Bad Content Click thru rate (CTR) means nothing if your audience doesn’t land or stick to your content. Why would that happen? One of the [...]

Metric Mythology: Click thru, conversions, and page views2023-03-06T10:09:19-05:00